Peter Zeihan

It's cheaper to move electricity than coal.

So let's burn the coal locally and send the power out to the population centers.

So the federal government stepped in and helped push through all of this development work.

And so now this zone has like quadruple the long range transmission that they're using in some places less than a fifth.

It's the only place that could really build out what we need quickly.

Everywhere else in the country needs to build those lines before they think about things like nuclear power.

Because if you build nuclear power, you might be able to supply your city right there, but you're not going to be able to ship it anywhere else.

That's in part a regulatory issue, but it's mostly just hardware.

From a technical point of view, you can go up and down whatever you want.

But going up looks a lot to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission like a meltdown.

So functionally, no, not at all.

So nuclear is only for baseload in the United States.

And I think that's broadly a good way to look at it.

So for data centers, nuclear is a good match because data centers churn 24 hours a day.

Nuclear goes 24 hours a day.

Solar and wind for data centers are some of the stupidest things I've ever seen people put on paper.

Because to make that work, you need to build five times the solar and wind that you would need to power the center and then build a massive, at least 24-hour duration battery system.

By the way, no one in the country has more than 10 minutes.

And just the cost is just extreme.

And even then it wouldn't be stable or reliable.